Adrian Desmond

David Kohn opens his monumental Darwinian Heritage with a deftly-delivered kick, observing that a study of the wider institutional culture of Darwin’s day seems to be ‘beyond the present ken of historians of 19th-century biology’. It’s a well-aimed blow. Little of the Darwin industry’s capital has been spent on exploring evolution in its social context. It isn’t that the subject is taboo (as it was a generation ago), just that the pioneering work of the textual analysts scrutinising Darwin’s notebooks has dominated the scene of late – and rightly so, given their immense contribution to our understanding of the route Darwin took to natural selection.’

In a world where dockers vote Tory and Cambridge graduates become KGB colonels, predicting class behaviour is a chancy business. Let me conjure up a still more incongruous example. Conceive a manor-born gentleman, with a private fortune exceeding £30,000 in the 1840s, respectably Whig and with a family dislike of fierce radicalism. He is Cambridge-educated and until recently a prospective parson. Now consider the times. The pauper presses are screaming for democratic concessions. Owenite unions are threatening the Church Establishment and gentrified privileges, using a levelling Lamarckism to make their point. In 1839 the century’s most serious working-class insurrection breaks out. On any social-interest theory, how could the gentleman, recently returned from a privately-financed circumnavigation, as companion to Castlereagh’s nephew, sit down in 1837-9 and devise a mechanistic theory of organic transmutation?